We’re glad those are the choices we’ve made. Today, we are launching the Signal Foundation, an emerging 501(c)(3) nonprofit created and made possible by Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous. In case you missed it, Brian left WhatsApp and Facebook last year, and has been thinking about how to best focus his future time and energy on building nonprofit technology for public good.

Starting with an initial $50,000,000 in funding, we can now increase the size of our team, our capacity, and our ambitions. This means reduced uncertainty on the path to sustainability, and the strengthening of our long-term goals and values. Perhaps most significantly, the addition of Brian brings an incredibly talented engineer and visionary with decades of experience building successful products to our team.

In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.

"PIC has sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency for information about a proposal to expand Internet surveillance and deploy weakened security standards."

EFF declares crypto-wars restarted after NYT report on US government request for surveillance backdoors to all comms tech. "This is exactly the wrong message for the U.S. government to be sending to the rest of the world."

"A novel technique could see future Web services work with sensitive data without ever being able to read it. Several implementations of a mathematical proof unveiled just last year will allow cryptographers to start making the proposal more practical."